* * * * * *
Oh, it was a beautiful day!
The sun pushed past the
tar-black clouds, spilling golden joy like honey from a jar. The winds had
slowed as well, to just under 160 kilometers an hour—not even enough to uproot
a tree. There was far less cinder and ash in the air than usual, so I could
make out the blasted thicket across the soybean field—a thicket I couldn’t
ordinarily see unless I was close enough to throw a rock at it. And the
thermometer outside my window read 51 degrees, making it the warmest August
morning I could remember.
Why, oh why did it have to
be so gorgeous on the day I had to go?
I sat on my bed and packed
the last of my clothes into my suitcase, trying not to look out the window. It
would be my first time leaving home—the first night I’d spend away from my
parents, my brother, the house where I was born. I kept telling myself, You’re seventeen, it’s time you went out
into the world; but that was just the problem.
I wasn’t going out into the
world. I was going someplace else entirely.
There was no mistaking how
big a deal this was. I hadn’t even left yet, and it had already changed my
life. My parents had become noticeably shy around me, as if I was already the
stranger I might soon become.
It was hardest on Cody. He
was three years younger than me and very much a baby brother, even though he
was now a teenager himself. I’d had to spend my childhood studying my parents,
trying to make sense of the world from the confusing, contradictory clues they
gave off; but when Cody was a kid, he never needed to do that. He’d had me to
explain everything to him. And he’d depended on me ever since.
Now I was going away, and he
was only just starting to realize what that meant. Suddenly he was shy around
me, too, not sure of what to say to me, what to think about life without me. We
used to spend our days together, inseparable, but lately it was almost like he
hid from me. I missed him. And I hadn’t even gone yet.
I sighed and looked out the
window again. The winds had torn open a hole the size of a tractor in the
clouds, and one whole section of the farm was all yellow and glowing. When we
were kids, Cody and I would whoop with happiness at such a sight, quickly suit
up, and tear outside to jump around and dance in the warmth and the light
before the clouds closed up again.
But I wasn’t a kid anymore.
Something was different now. I could feel it inside—something restless,
something reaching. I was sorry to be leaving Cody; but I was ready for new
challenges, new experiences that he couldn’t be part of.
A rustling at the door made
me turn away from the window; and there he was, leaning against the jamb. How
long had he been standing there? I felt a stab of guilt, like he might have
been reading my thoughts.
“Hi,” I said.
He dragged one toe across
the floor. “Still packing?” he asked listlessly, like he wasn’t really
interested.
“Figured that out, huh?” I said, nodding at my open suitcase.
But he didn’t laugh, or
tease me back. Instead he crept in and sat on the edge of the bed—lightly, as
if at any second he might change his mind and run back out. He watched as I
folded up one of my old radiation suits, and when I was about to put it in the
suitcase he said, “That one doesn’t fit you anymore.”
I looked down at it, like I
was seeing it for the first time. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Plus,” he added, “you won’t
really need it where you’re going, right?”
“Right,” I said. I dropped
the suit back on the bed.
I was afraid to say or do
anything else; this was the closest we’d come to talking about my leaving since
the day the letter came. Then, everyone had been excited and proud; it was only
a few weeks later that the doubts and worries had set in.
Outside, the hole in the
clouds closed up and the big bowl of sunlight disappeared.
“Tell me again why you have
to go,” Cody blurted, with a catch in his voice that took me completely by
surprise. I was afraid he might cry, and I couldn’t allow that. Not on such a
beautiful day. Not on the day I was going away.
“I don’t...have to go,” I said, choosing my words
carefully. “I want to.” He looked at
me, not understanding—or not letting himself understand. “It’s an honor. I
couldn’t say no. Plus, it’s so...I mean, it could open up so many...” Agh! It was crazy hard to talk with him
looking at me this way—eyes wide, almost begging me to make it all make sense
to him. “I have a chance to do something, to improve all our lives—not just
mine.”
“You won’t know anyone
there,” he said. “They won’t get you at all.”
“Only at first. That’s the
whole point of the place. Bridging the gap that divides us. Learning about each other.”
“Parallel U.,” he said with
a sneer in his voice.
“Yes,” I said, tossing it
back at him, but without the sarcasm, “Parallel U.” He scowled and pulled at a
loose thread on my blanket. To cheer him up, I said, “You might go there
yourself, someday.”
He looked up at me with an
expression that said, We both know I’ll
never leave Kansas. And it was true; I was the exceptional one in the
family—the one whose mind moved like lightning, whose curiosity expanded beyond
the framework of the tiny life we knew here and grasped for something bigger,
something grander.
I closed my suitcase.
Another awkward silence fell over us that Cody broke by saying, “Are there any
other parallels like ours? Where there was The War, and everything?”
I’d already considered this;
investigated it, in fact. I tried to phrase my findings so he could understand
them. “There are some parallels where something like The War happened; but
mostly the people all died.”
“So there really won’t be
anyone like you,” he said, a tone of bitter triumph in his voice.
“Probably not. But there’ll
be people there who are as different as me. That’s the whole point of Parallel
U. Ever since the Veil was pierced, and they discovered all the different
parallels—all the alternate Earths where history took different paths—they’ve
been trying to bring people together to share their experiences and to pool
their knowledge.”
“I know,” he said
defensively. I had to watch myself; I didn’t want to come off like I was lecturing
him.
I began again. “I may meet
people from parallels where America was colonized by the Spanish instead of the
English. Or where Christianity never took hold and western civilization is
still pagan. Or where the Nazis won World War Two. Though in that case,” I
added with a smile, “I hope not.”
“How are you even supposed
to talk to them?” he asked, desperate to find some flaw in my plans, some
reason for me to give up at the last moment and stay home.
“It’ll be easy,” I said. “I
already speak English. And since the physicists who first pierced the Veil were
British, that’s the school’s official language.”
Cody had used up all his
arguments. He turned away and sulked.
“Don’t,” I said. “Come on,
Cody. It’s not like I want to go. I mean, I do;
I want to go, but I don’t want to leave.
Not you. Not Mom and Dad. If only I could split myself in two!”
He refused to look at me. “I
don’t care if you leave or not. I just think you’d be happier at home.”
“Cody...” I stopped myself; I didn’t want our
last talk together to be an argument. “Listen, I’ll be home for holidays. And
probably for the summer.”
He whirled. “Probably for the summer? You’re not
sure?”
“Well...no. A lot of the
students come from parallels where schools don’t have a summer break. Of course
the university accommodates them. And since I’m only on a two-year scholarship,
I might take advantage of that and apply for classes during June and Jul—”
“You can’t wait to get away
from us,” he interrupted. “You can’t wait to forget you ever knew us and be
embarrassed when anyone reminds you of us.”
My shoulders slumped. “Cody,
you know that’s not so...”
He fled the room.
I sat numbly on the bed for
a while. Inky, the family cat, slid up onto the covers and rubbed against my
arm and purred, as though this were just another day and so would be tomorrow,
and I surprised myself by bursting into tears and clutching him to my chest. He
panicked and scratched my arm, and when I loosened my grip he propelled himself
away from me.
I was upset, and I knew why.
Cody’s accusation had hit a nerve: I did
want to leave. I didn’t want to waste my life—waste my mind—on this scorched, barren world, where the most anyone could
hope for was to stumble along from season to season, scratching out the barest
living possible from the hot, irradiated soil. I felt such a whirlwind of
possibility and hope, so many feelings and ambitions, and there was nowhere in
this parallel where I could act on any of them.
I wanted to go away, and
never come back.
Except...I didn’t. I was
born here. I grew up here. The only people who loved me, in all the dozens of
parallels on record, were right here.
I brought my knees up to my
face and clutched my ankles, and cried some more. And that’s how Mom found me,
twenty minutes later.
“Merri, honey, it’s time to
go,” she said, and from the swollen look on her face I could tell she’d been
crying too. We hugged, and she added, “You’re going such a long way away.”
I sniffled and gazed up at
her. “Depends on how you look at it,” I said. “In one sense, I’m just going to
England.”
“An
England. One of many. And one I’ll probably never see.”
“I know,” I said, suddenly
feeling the weight of my decision. Apparently Cody had gotten to me after all.
“Mom,” I said, and I didn’t need to go on; the terrified tone in my voice said
it all.
“Hush, now,” she said,
squeezing my shoulder. “You’ve gotten this far, so it’s no time for doubts.
Besides, you know what I always say: Better to give it a try than to miss out
and cry.”
I laughed in spite of
everything. “I can’t believe one of your lame expressions is actually making me
feel better.”
She pretended to be shocked.
“Who says my expressions are lame?”
“Everyone,” I said, and she put her hands around my neck and mock-strangled me. I
cracked up.
Then she kissed me on the
forehead and checked the seams of my radiation suit, and said, “You’d better
get going, your father’s waiting.” And her voice sounded funny, like those were
the last syllables she was going to be able to manage for a while. So I picked
up my suitcase and went to the garage, where I found Dad loading my bags into
the back of the truck.
He looked up brightly and
said, “Guess my little girl’s really heading off to college!” I started crying
again, and he looked guilty, like he didn’t know what he’d said wrong; then he
very thoroughly double-checked the boot’s radiation seals. It should’ve taken
him about five seconds, but he kept at it until I reined in my bawling, which
took quite a bit longer.
He gently helped me into the
truck, climbed up after me, and shut and sealed the doors. He started the motor
and pressed the button to lower the shield behind him; the garage door noisily
scrolled back and the truck pulled out onto the gravel drive.
I braced myself for the
first slam of the wind into the vehicle; with that out of the way, I craned my
neck for a final look at the only place I’d ever called home: the tiny
farmhouse, built into the side of a hill to protect it from the worst of the
ion storms, and surrounded by the acres of blasted fields that had, with
tireless effort, day in and day out, yielded up just enough sustenance to keep
the family going all these years. Suddenly I had a “grown-up moment,” as Cody
called them—one of those sudden realizations where I grasped something terribly
important that never occurred to me as a kid. I realized how fragile our lives
had been, and how one small miscalculation, one injury or spell of bad luck,
might have ruined us entirely. And there was no more government to bail us out
or even lend a helping hand.
I looked at Dad as though seeing
him for the first time, and tried to imagine the load he shouldered every day.
I wondered why it was that I never appreciated this about him till now, when I
was saying goodbye. And almost as quickly I knew the answer: It was only because I was saying goodbye that I
could see him this way.
I wanted to say something,
to let him know I understood and respected and loved him for it. And I was
trying to find the right words when, at just about the point where our property
ends and the Loughlins’ begins, he didn’t watch where he was going and hit a
nest by the side of the road, and as he was backing up, about a hundred
cockroaches came spilling out of it and swarmed over the truck. Dad cursed,
using some pretty blunt words I’d never heard him use before, and scrambled to
activate the grid on the truck’s exterior that repelled the roaches with an
electric charge.
I looked out the window as
the roaches fell to the side of the road, sizzling and smoking. Dad said, as he
always did whenever we encountered them, “Damn filthy things—big as dogs.”
Because apparently when he was a kid, cockroaches were no bigger than your
thumb, and it was only after The War that radiation mutated them to jumbo size.
Dad liked to tease Mom by saying there’s no reason we shouldn’t use them as a
food source—they were so plentiful, and they were pure protein, and he knew
people who treated them like livestock and had recipes for them and everything,
which would make Mom go very quiet and shut herself in the bathroom till he
changed the subject. But I know he was never really serious about it, because
he was always unnerved by the roaches too, no matter how many times we ran into
them; and also, the stink of them was just awful. You’d never, ever want it in
your kitchen. Even now I thought I could smell it leaking through the radiation
seals, but that was impossible; it was just my traumatized brain filling in the
stench I knew was outside.
Dad seemed pretty shaken up;
in fact, a lot more than usual. And come to think of it, it wasn’t like him to
hit a nest like that. He was usually the most careful driver ever. And all at
once I realized he was upset about my leaving too, and it was distracting him,
affecting his focus.
He checked the truck’s
battery level; it was now dangerously low. Activating the repellent grid had
seriously depleted it. He’d have to stop for a charge after dropping me off,
and maybe even before. And I wondered if maybe he even hit the nest on purpose,
so he’d have an excuse for running out the truck’s power and missing my
appointment at the Terminus Dock, which would mean keeping me home a while
longer.
But no, that was silly; it
wasn’t like him at all.
Was it?
I reached over and placed my
hand in his. He closed his fingers around mine and gave me a smile. Then
without letting go of me, he used his free hand to steer the truck back onto
the gravel road, and we drove the rest of the way in silence.
I wonder now, many months later, about what he did after he left
me—whether he stopped to recharge the truck, or took a gamble that he could
make it home and charge it overnight in our own garage. Either way, I like to
think he made it back in time to see Mom and Cody; I like to think he reached
them first, so that they were together when it happened. But I’ll never know
for sure.
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